On his book Jazz Icons: Heroes, Myths and the Jazz Tradition
Cover Interview of August 09, 2010
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“How and why legendary figures are needed to tell historical stories.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“It is irrelevant and impossible to know whether Ellington was in fact bisexual. However, what I am interested in is the problem this concept presents for jazz audiences and fans of Ellington alike.”
On the second:
“Besides turning everyday assumptions on their heads, Jazz Icons finds significance in things that usually go unnoticed.”
Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017
It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016
Editor’s note
Originally, this interview ran on the Rorotoko cover page under the headline
“How and why legendary figures are needed to tell historical stories.”
We highlighted two quotes.
On the first page:
“It is irrelevant and impossible to know whether Ellington was in fact bisexual. However, what I am interested in is the problem this concept presents for jazz audiences and fans of Ellington alike.”
On the second:
“Besides turning everyday assumptions on their heads, Jazz Icons finds significance in things that usually go unnoticed.”